Denver International Airport may become a giant boondoggle.
Are grizzlies safe?
Grizzly bears in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem have “recovered” and no longer need protection under the Endangered Species Act. That’s the opinion of a federal team known as the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee, which decided in December to support the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s decision to petition for delisting the bear. “People should keep…
Albuquerque didn’t want to hear it
Dear HCN, I was most interested in Bruce Selcraig’s article on the pending water crisis facing the city that never listens (HCN, 12/26/94). I was enticed by the city manager, Richard Wilson, in 1971 to assume the position of planning director of the combined planning programs of Albuquerque/Bernalillo County Planning Commissions. One year later Wilson…
Oregon’s Wallowa County is suffering
Dear HCN: Had reporter Kathie Durbin been more thorough in her examination of the facts (about the hanging in effigy in Joseph, Ore., of two environmentalists (HCN, 11/14/94), she would have discovered the unemployment rate in Wallowa County is nearly twice as high as she erroneously reported in her exposé on our ugly little town.…
Airports show difference between Denver and Utah
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, The West sings the Denver airport blues. It’ll be far more expensive for airlines to operate at Denver’s new airport than at other airports in the West – which puts the Denver hub at a new disadvantage. To recoup the higher charges, airlines are…
Option 9 survives
In a rare environmental victory for the Clinton administration, a federal judge upheld the president’s plan for protecting wildlife and allowing some timber cutting in the federal forests of the Pacific Northwest. Judge William Dwyer of Seattle, who said in 1991 that federal land managers had committed “deliberate, systematic” violations of environmental laws, ruled Dec.…
L-P coughs up
Corporate giant Louisiana-Pacific must answer, finally, to a diminutive plaintiff. Four families who successfully sued the wood-products company two years ago will now collect their $2.3 million settlement. The U.S. Supreme Court recently denied the company’s appeal of the original judgment, reports the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. The case centers on the small town of…
Wilderness trader cashes in
When the Forest Service agreed to give developer Tom Chapman 110 acres near the ski town of Telluride, Colo., in exchange for his wilderness inholding on the Gunnison National Forest, critics were outraged. They said taxpayers would lose valuable public land while Chapman stood to gain a huge profit. Apparently, the critics were right. Chapman,…
Land-use planning can be a nightmare
Dear HCN, As a Seattle-suburbs hobby farmer (horses), widow of a lawyer, mother of four college graduates, and (unpaid) legislative liaison for the King County Property Rights Alliance, I am also one of those “people with an ideological predisposition who are most vulnerable to independence, anti-government and property rights slogans.” (Hoo-ha!) The condescension of the…
‘Wise-use’ laws challenged
Environmentalists are challenging the “wise-use” laws of Catron County, N.M., that have become a model for other rural counties around the West. Two groups, the Greater Gila Biodiversity Project and Gila Watch, along with several private citizens, filed suit in federal court Nov. 17 charging that the ordinances are unconstitutional and violate civil rights laws.…
BuRec will halt water spreading
Dear HCN, Those who simply scanned Paul Koberstein’s Nov. 28, 1994, headline, “BuRec to allow water thefts to continue,” may have assumed that Reclamation is not addressing the problem of unauthorized use of water. That’s not the case. Reclamation is actively seeking to eliminate the unauthorized use of water, sometimes referred to as water spreading.…
A Newtonian vision
A cadre of policy wonks from some ultra-conservative think tanks decended on Capitol Hill Jan. 11 to tell sympathetic Republicans how they’d strip the budgets of the Department of Interior and the Forest Service. Representatives of the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy and Citizens Against Government Waste urged legislators to: *…
Park Service can’t reform itself
Dear HCN, “Shrink To Fit” (HCN, 11/12/94), about downsizing the Park Service, hit me where I used to live. Almost 40 years ago I began a Park Service career as a laborer on a trail maintenance crew at Many Glacier. Two months ago I was one of the 425 who took the “buyout” and retired.…
Imported wolves lope off into Idaho wilderness
Editor’s note: After being trapped, caged, tested for disease and analyzed by genotype by having blood and tissue taken, inoculated, ear-tagged, radio-collared and tranquilized, they were loaded up for a plane ride south. This was a trip more than a decade in the making – restoring wolves to the West. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, on…
So far, wolf reintroduction survives legal challenge
Wolves arrived in central Idaho and Yellowstone last week after evading enemies in courtrooms and legislatures around the region. The frenzy of last-minute legal maneuvering preceding their return has fragmented opinion on both sides of the issue and bewildered onlookers. Five months ago, to block the wolves’ return, the American Farm Bureau and the Mountain…
The West sings the Denver airport blues
It was billed as a black-tie gala: Denver’s finest coming together to celebrate the grand opening of the city’s new international airport. Nearly 4,000 people were trying to breathe life into the cathedral-like terminal building, where banquet tables had been set on a granite floor meant for the footsteps of millions of air travelers. A…
Developer paralyzes Jackson’s new plan
JACKSON, Wyo. – Jackson officials thought they were in the clear when they adopted the town’s new zoning master plan in November. They had spent an agonizing three years writing and revising the document. A small army of consultants and lawyers finally sanctioned it. Thousands of hours of public hearings had been logged. At the…
Ambition becomes a megamess
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, The West sings the Denver airport blues. “To our despair, (megaprojects) often develop lives of their own, and their lives sometimes defy control by us mere mortals.” – An unnamed Exxon engineer, quoted in the Rand Corp. study, Understanding the Outcomes of Megaprojects When…
Feds targeted by louder thunder from below
SALT LAKE CITY, Utah – Met Johnson worried that no one would show up for the two-day Western Summit of conservative state legislators, county commissioners and public-land users he organized here in January. Johnson, the leader of the so-called “Cowboy Caucus” in the Utah House of Representatives, feared the “steam might have gone out of…
Plucky ‘Batman and Robin’ make an airport their case
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, The West sings the Denver airport blues. Excerpts from a free-ranging interview with two of the most effective critics of Denver International Airport. PAUL EARLE: We have to keep buying new file drawers, shifting them around to make room for more. We’ve got more…
Yellowstone bison guts pile up
On the day after Christmas, bison migrating downhill from Yellowstone National Park’s northern range once again met gunfire in Montana. Caught in a power struggle between the National Park Service, whose policy of “natural regulation” has allowed their numbers to grow to an estimated 4,300, and the livestock industry, which is worried about disease, more…
White Mesa Utes beat back Superfund tailings
BLANDING, Utah – The small band of White Mesa Utes, who live on a reservation about 10 miles south of here, hadn’t scored any big victories since the 1920s, when the U.S. government recognized their need for a homeland. But the Utes won a big one in December, when Assistant Energy Secretary Thomas Grumbly decided…
An ersatz democracy gets what it deserves
In the late 1980s, the city and county of Denver chose to look away from a deteriorating public school system, dirty air, traffic jams and inadequate public transportation, to pour $10 billion into 53 square miles of prairie out toward Kansas. As this special issue shows, the decision to build Denver International Airport was made…
Babbitt cedes grazing reform to Congress
Every time Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt stood at a podium in the West during the last two years to talk about grazing reform, it seemed he faced a sea of cowboy hats. Now, with his Rangeland Reform “94 program failing in a Republican Congress, the West’s 28,000 public-lands ranchers are riding taller in the political…
Bidding war shakes up Idaho grazing leases
Jonathan Marvel, the feisty head of the Idaho Watersheds Project, kicked off a flurry of conflicting bids for Idaho state grazing leases in December. Marvel forked out $1,430 to prevail as the high bidder in three auctions involving a total of 1,320 acres of state land. But the largest sums were bid in auctions that…
Forest Service may finally evaluate grazing
As the Clinton administration backpedals in the nation’s capitol from grazing reforms, an environmental lawsuit is moving ahead in Montana. A federal judge will soon decide whether the Forest Service must do analyses for 150 allotments where ranchers run livestock on the Beaverhead National Forest. Last March, the National Wildlife Federation and its Montana affiliate…
Dear friends
A special issue Usually, 16 pages every other week is all it takes to report the news from our million-square-mile West, this being the sleepy region it is. But because we skipped an issue, and because writer Ray Ring has a lengthy report on Denver International Airport, and because of what we call the “wolf…